Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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26.6.15

To say it’s been a bad week for the
Constitution, rule of law, and democracy in America would be a gross
understatement. The question now is how does Louisiana respond to these
affronts?

In its King v. Burwell decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court majority simply maimed the Constitution, leaving it for dead with
tortured reasoning to produce a political outcome that rivals Dred Scott v.
Sandford for its politicization and incoherence. By not understanding “established
by the state,” the majority ruled that words have no meaning except that which
it decides to give them according to whatever ideology at least five archons
believe in, should they think that the democratic institutions would fail to
follow the same.

However, as this was a matter of
federal law, essentially Louisiana need do nothing as a result. With the law
dealing with health insurance exchanges that made it optional for states to
establish, it can continue to save money by making the federal government pay
for these (and proportionately lightening the burden on state taxpayers, even
as they pay for this in a much smaller proportion on their federal taxes) until
which future time they are abolished when meaningful and genuine health care
reform replaces the current unsustainable law that empowers the state at the
expense of the individual.

25.6.15

If the seemingly-outmanned Virginia
Cavaliers could take down the mighty defending champion Vanderbilt Commodores
in college baseball, then maybe Gov. Bobby
Jindal can win the presidency of the United States. The trick is in
convincing the electorate that he can run the playbook better than he did as
governor.

Yesterday, Jindal made his official
announcement that he will seek the presidency of the United States, but
that served as mere punctuation. Talk about a presidential run began as soon as
he succeeded on his second try for governor in 2007, revisiting the scuttlebutt
that had surrounded the likes of former Govs. Buddy
Roemer in the late 1980s and John
McKeithen in the 1960s that they compete for nomination by Democrats. But
in making it official, he is the first Louisianan since former Gov. Huey
Long to openly declare he will contest for a major party nomination who has
a non-trivial chance of winning it (although he has not followed the Kingfish
in writing about what he’ll do in his first few days in the White House if
elected). And observers who think this announcement is part of a larger
strategy primarily designed to land him a post-gubernatorial job in a
Republican presidential administration, as a national political pundit, or as a
leader of a public policy interest group, misjudge the man.

No, Jindal is in it to win it.
There’s no reason he should think otherwise, despite very low polling numbers.
His whole life has followed a path of unlikely success. His parents hardly
having been in the U.S. when he was born, he succeeded handsomely in every
academic sense, started close to the top of the state’s bureaucracy after a
short stint in the private sector just a couple of years after graduate
studies, and moved into the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy before
expressing intent to run for governor in 2003. Starting low in the polls, he
outdistanced other more experienced Republicans and Democrats alike to win the
most votes in the general election, but lost in the runoff, yet parlayed that
into a convincing U.S. House of Representatives win a year later and subsequent
reelection. Nothing could stop his gubernatorial quest in 2007 and he secured
reelection even more impressively in 2011. Simply, he has succeeded in
everything meaningful that he has tried, and there’s no reason to believe he
does not think the presidency is within reach, especially with a GOP field so
fragmented at this point.

24.6.15

Having already taken more than a
billion dollars out of Louisiana than they put it, filmmakers and related
interests backing an industry mouthpiece group don’t appear to mind draining a
little more of the people’s money through lawsuits they can’t win, because they
do desperately want to keep riding the gravy train.

In the aftermath of the enactment
of Act 134,
which among other things placed a limit of $180 million on the amount of Motion
Picture Investor Tax Credits that could be redeemed a year for the next three
fiscal years and limited to $30 million the amount any single production could
receive, the Louisiana Film Entertainment
Association said it expected holders
of the credits to sue the state, claiming that the restrictions violate
contractual obligations, and it will join them with one of their own.

Which, unless the group suddenly
has turned into a civil libertarian outfit that takes on laws at least somewhat
out of philosophical objections that is contrary to its history of shilling for
a law that returns anywhere from 13
to 23 cents to taxpayers for every dollar they shell out, on the surface
seems a curious thing for it to do. After all, although no central repository
identifies who holds what credits, likely only a small minority are held by
producers and other interested parties who back the group, because these are
not refundable and therefore only can be used against Louisiana tax liability.
What they owe never ends up very large and almost every production, sometimes
dramatically (one
film took away $35 million worth against a liability a fraction of that),
exceeds that, so producers take advantage of the guaranteed selling clause to
the state that currently pays out 85 cents on the buck or sell them to brokers.
This puts most of these into the hands of Louisiana citizens and businesses
(and politicians),
who have nothing to do with this group.

23.6.15

Within days, the U.S. Supreme Court
will
make a ruling that could spread same sex marriage nationwide (even if they
permit states to prohibit it by also making them recognize these from other
states). If so, the case of former Shreveport fire chief Kelvin Cochran stands
as a warning to the excess that may result.

After Cochran came up through the
ranks in Shreveport, his career trajectory, including a stint as the United
States Fire Administrator, took him to Atlanta as head of its fire department.
During his (second) tenure there he wrote and self-published a devotional book concerning
men and Christian faith, where in part of it he explored his belief that
marriage only was to be between a single man and single woman, calling
homosexual behavior “perversion.”

For that, he was fired
despite an internal investigation revealing he never had discriminated illegally
against any employee on the basis of that belief or on any other basis. In
other words, he was terminated for his thinking, not for any of his actions
with others, that he did not have the right personal beliefs for him to hold
the job. The city justified its action that its senior administrators could not
express beliefs contrary to opinions nebulously contained in a
government-defined perception of the city’s views without approval and that
Cochran had not received this before publishing – despite the fact the mayor
had a copy of it for many months prior to the suspension handed down during the
investigation and Cochran said he received verbal approval – and then when
ordered to stay quiet about it during the investigation did not. He has since
sued the city.

22.6.15

Perhaps because he may have plans
to get out of town for a period, Gov. Bobby
Jindal has not wasted time in casting vetoes, but so far left unchanged his
hisotircal penchant for getting these right, with one major exception.

In the past, Jindal typically has
waited as long as he can before vetoing, which makes sense to maximize your
decision period. But he started early in his last roundup as governor, putting
his highest-profile
cancellation on HB 42 by
state Rep. Sam
Jones, which unwisely would have accelerated a pension raise to retired
state employees and teachers and beneficiaries that would have degraded further
the retirement systems’ stability at taxpayer expense. Other necessary ones have
come as well.

HB 370 by
state Rep. Chris
Broadwater would have interposed an unelected panel into human resource
management decisions made by the executive branch. While Jindal pointed
out the politically-appointed group from outside his auspices, which would
have had the power to make the Division of Administration’s Office of Group
Benefits comply with premiums rates it established for insurance products offered
to state employees, lacked OGB representation and increased the possibility
that politics would trump actuarial-based reasons to determine rates, a more
fundamental flaw ordained this veto. It’s never sound practice to violate unity
of command in the management of personnel, as this makes the manager less able
to induce performance from employees. By having an outside entity interfere with
this important decision, the pricing of benefits, which determines employee
recruitment, retention, and motivation, this thereby makes working at cross-purposes
more likely, reducing the tools at disposal to shape bureaucratic behavior in a
coherent fashion. If dissatisfied with personnel policy by a governor, the
solution is not to muddle the environment but to change governors through election,
recall, or impeachment.

21.6.15

By the logic of his own statement,
it turns out that state Rep. Sam Jones hates
the people of Louisiana. And perhaps even emulating Gov. Bobby
Jindal in the antipathy of which he accuses the governor, neither of which lead
to good policy-making in the area of pensions.

The ever-reliably partisan Democrat
blowhard, Jones spared no comity, nor any pretense of intellectual coherence,
in criticizing Jindal’s decision to veto HB 42,
which would have inserted a pension raise of up to 1.5 or 2 percent (depending
on the system) for state and teacher retirees and beneficiaries already
pensioned for the first $60,000 paid. This would void a law passed last year
that would provide such a raise no more often than every other year as part of
a strategy to bring down the state’s unfunded accrued liabilities from a
stratospheric $19 billion that must be paid off by 2029 at an average cost to
the citizenry of $1.5 billion a year.

Essentially, the law would insert
at least an extra year’s worth of increase, guaranteed. Current law prohibits
an increase for this year, as part of the mandatory skip, but the bill would
slot one in. Further, even for FY 2016 and beyond a raise is not guaranteed,
for it would be determined on the basis of the change in the Consumer Price
Index-Urban indicator by being no higher than that (and capped at a maximum
depending on system health which currently would suggest this figure be 1.5
percent), if the fund in question earned an adequate rate of return. If because
of this proposed raise that the metrics towards elimination of the UAL were not
met, the bill specified that the employer – the state or local agencies who use
taxation power to fund salaries – would pay the difference. The math showed in
the first five years that this meant an additional liability of $70 million,
for which taxpayers ultimately would be liable.

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